What we teach is not that which comes out of the experience or heart of man. It is that which God has revealed to us in our own language in propositions that we can understand. At this point we are criticized. Some people say, “Well, that really is something you can’t support because why should you regard the Bible in particular as God’s revelation?” We answer at that point, “We believe that the Bible is the Word of God because the Lord Jesus Christ taught this. And if He is God and, therefore, speaks truthfully as God must speak, then we can trust what He says about the Bible.”
Some people say, “Well, no, you can’t do that because that’s circular reasoning. You go to the Bible to find out about Jesus Christ, and you listen to Jesus Christ to hear what He has to say about the Bible. The Bible supports Jesus and Jesus supports the Bible.” But it is not circular reasoning because of how we establish the relationship between Jesus and the Bible. We go to the Bible as we would to any other historical book. As we study it we ask, “Is it genuinely reliable? Is this the kind of book that seems to bear witness to true events?” And we conclude that it is, as even secular sources have done. We then ask, “What’s the Bible talking about?” Well, what it is chiefly talking about is Jesus Christ.
Our next step from there is to see who Jesus is. From the Bible we see that Christ came making extraordinary claims. He claimed to have a unique relationship with God, calling Him His Father. Indeed, Jesus Himself claimed to be the divine Son of God. After His resurrection Thomas fell down before Him and said, “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28). Therefore, as the divine Son Jesus is clearly an infallible authority.
From there we proceed to ask what does Jesus teach, specifically concerning the Bible? We discover that Jesus not only taught that the Bible was God’s Word and could be trusted, but also that He, the Lord Jesus Christ, the very Son of God, patterned His own life upon the Bible. He had come to fulfill the Bible by dying and rising again for sinners. So if the Bible presents Christ to us as He truly is, and if Jesus spoke authoritatively about the Bible, then the view of the Lord Jesus Christ about the Bible must be our view. This is not circular reasoning, but a sound approach. We can therefore take the Bible’s message to the world and tell them that this is what God has to say to people today. We make it our task to persuade people of these truths.
That is what Paul was talking about in 2 Corinthians. He begins by discussing the knowledge that concerned himself and his aspirations. This flows from the previous chapter, where he was talking about the difficulties he had gone through in his ministry. But he did not lose heart in all of that because he was fixing his eyes on those unseen spiritual things that are eternal. Paul focuses on them because that is what matters in the long run. That is what is going to be left when heaven and earth pass away. That which God has done in the lives of people remains.
